News

PIERROT PORTRAITS  – quite an experience

Back in May I was invited to shoot a series of portraits for a CD cover; a new release by the soprano Claire Booth and Ensemble 360. The album was to be called ‘Pierrot Portraits’ and it features music inspired by the commedia dell’arte character Pierrot, sometimes known as the sad clown. Someone, in their wisdom, decided that with such an album concept then a set of portraits of the musicians, complete with Pierrot make-up, would make an ideal album cover And that’s where I came into the project. Why me? Well I have to declare an interest in that my son Benjamin, is a member of Ensemble 360, and they were looking for a photographer with musical sympathies and a low fee demand, very low!

The shoot took place in Sheffield, in the Crucible Theatre.  A make-up artist was hired and we had just a morning to get the job done. The musicians were in the middle of a major chamber music festival in Sheffield and the soprano Claire Booth came up from London. I soon became aware that the pressure was on. 

Four new guides and tutorials have been created and are located in the members area – guides and tutorial section – for the following subjects.

1. Preparing images for print

2. Ordering prints from DSCL

3. Posting to the NOPS Facebook page

4. Posting to the NOPS instagram page

These guides were created by Lois Webb & the Facebook tutorial by Mark Taylor, if you would like to see other guides please let the editors know.

September 2024 4th Print Competition 

The fourth print competition of the year was held on Thursday 28^th September at St James church Hall the home of the Nottingham Outlaws. The print competition started back in March 2024 and is run on a bi-monthly basis. Going into this leg of the print competition Lester Woodward & Lois Webb were tying for first place both on 322 points, in third place was Nigel Stewart (315pts) followed closely by Chris Holdsworth (314pts). Tonight’s penultimate competition could give one of the leading group the edge over their close rivals. 

The judge for this round of the competition was Malcolm Sales, a judge who had visited the Outlaws on several previous occasions. Malcolm started off the evening complementing the Outlaws on the quality of their printing, this comment cropped up a number of times as he went through the images one by one, part of the judging process.

There were two categories for Malcolm to judge, the Open category and the Themed which in this evening was “Architecture”. In total there were 21entries in the Open and 24 in the Themed.

September is the time of year when the Outlaws pack their camera bags, suitcases and embark on a journey to a location in the UK. We have visited many areas, from Norfolk in the east, Pembrokeshire in the west and Hastings in the south. This year we headed north to Loch Lomond and the Trossachs.

As British photographers we are used to all weathers but this year’s weekend weather proved very challenging. Whilst our home of Nottingham suffered a deluge of rain, we endured a blanket of grey cloud for the duration of the trip. It was great to be dry but any contrast for landscape photography was absent. Outlaws are made of strong stuff and were not to be defeated and worked a location to capture images all the same. Some members can claim to have seen the sun, a couple even a sunset. Typically, as we gathered for the group portrait in Balloch on the last morning the weather cleared and the sun appeared!

Every day we all headed out with hope that our empty memory cards would be filled with images, some starting very early as they had sunrises in mind, others with a full agenda of locations that needed to be visited and one or maybe even two members considering night-time shoots. But all had one thing in common and that was to see and photograph Scotland, ranging from its iconic castles, lochs and waterfalls to the stylish architecture and personalities of Glasgow.

There were plenty of opportunities for social breaks, lunches and dinners together as well as evenings where they could discuss the day’s activities over a beer, something the Outlaws looked forward to.

Some of the Outlaws tales of the trip will follow over the next few posts.

full story >